III. College Student’s Death is Unexplained.
(The following are excerpts from a New York paper. Every few months the press brings to light a similar death of an androgyne. All because the world misunderstands and grossly misjudges them, as well as because public opinion has always deprived them of the means of coming to an understanding of themselves. Bracketed words and italics are those of the author of The Female-Impersonators.)
STUDENT’S DEATH MYSTERY BAFFLING—NO KNOWN BASIS IN Q’S LIFE TO SUGGEST MURDER OR SUICIDE THEORY
Overdone detective fiction seldom presents so many significant but mostly inexplicable circumstances surrounding the victim of death by violence as those developed concerning [Jimmie Q], twenty, quiet, studious, religious [earmarks of androgynism], a [North Atlantic] college junior, popular, not morbid, a cleancut American youth, whose body was taken from the river last Thursday night....
Q loved to roam the slums of large cities. [An earmark of cultured androgynism. They thus roam because realizing that in their Overworld, they are prohibited outlet for the feminine side of their duality. They roam with day dreams of how they would like to impersonate a female in the Underworld, where alone female-impersonators are welcome; and finally, in many cases, they are carried away by their mania for an actual female-impersonation spree.]... His |Female-Impersonation Obsession.| college room-mate commented on the large number of neckties, all Q had, which the latter was taking along. [As he said, for a few days’ visit to his father, which visit did not take place. My theory is that he went to the great city, in whose harbor his dead body was found, to spend an evening with chance-met gangsters in the slums, as I have myself done, and he took the many neckties as presents for them, just as I myself have carried neckties with which to shower them and thus win their goodwill. The androgyne, of course, wishes the gangsters as an audience for his loved impersonations. Androgynes always wish an audience of tremendously virile “young fellows.”]
Q did not drink and never took special interest in any woman. But he did like to rove about in the districts of big cities in which the poorest classes live and work.... Whenever he was in New York, he spent most of his time in such districts....
At the Morgue, Mr. Q identified the effects of his son. When the body was exposed for his inspection—it appeared to have been in the water about ten days—the father bowed his head and tearfully exclaimed: “Poor Jimmie! How you must have suffered!”...
The fisherman who had pulled the body ashore had used a grappling hook.... To it they attributed the incision which the [City’s] Medical Examiner had reported to have been made by some weapon. The Medical Examiner denounced this report and suggested that the police were forwarding a suicide theory to escape responsibility for solution of a crime. He declared there was evidence of hemorrhage in this wound not producible by such an injury inflicted long after death. He further recalled that the left arm of Q was |Methods of Torture.| dislocated at the elbow, with the arm muscles twisted—positive indications of external violence. [I myself have been tortured by a ruffian’s seizing me by the wrist and twisting around my arm so that I had to shriek in agony.]
The Medical Examiner declared the absence of water in the lungs developed by the autopsy showed beyond question that Q was dead when his body entered the water.... He had seventy-seven cents in his pockets when his body was found. [Evidence of robbery, considering that he was a well-to-do youth on a visit to a great city distant from his college. My theory is, on the basis of intimate knowledge of the practices of androgynes, that he scraped acquaintance with one or more gangsters, while adopting a girl’s role. Many gangsters cordially hate bisexuals. Because of this hatred, as well as to escape prosecution after robbing Q, the gangsters murdered him and threw his dead body into the river—probably in the vicinity. Again the fundamental cause of the death of another androgyne is the terribly false teaching of the Church and public opinion as to the nature of bisexuality.]